The project was supposed to die after the defence. That's what final-year projects do: you build them, you present them, a panel nods, and the work disappears into a bound document nobody opens again.
Kelechi's didn't.
The problem under everyone's nose
In his final year of Computer Science, Kelechi needed a project topic and was tired of the usual suspects. The idea came, as the best ones do, from an ordinary annoyance: laundry. Hostel students either washed clothes themselves in buckets between lectures, or handed bags to informal washmen with no pricing, no timeline, and no recourse when a shirt vanished.
"My roommate lost three shirts in one month," he laughs. "Three. To three different washmen. I started keeping a notebook of who washed well and who didn't, and I realised — this notebook is a product."
The project became a simple ordering system for hostel laundry: standard prices, pickup windows, and a record of every bag.
From defence panel to first customer
The defence went fine. What happened after was the unusual part: a hall mate asked if the system was real, because he had a bag of clothes and a test the next day.
That first bag was washed by Kelechi himself, in a bucket, at night.
Within a month he had a partner — a washerwoman near Campus 2 with capacity and no customer pipeline — and a pricing sheet. Within three months, two more washing partners and a delivery guy. The notebook had become a spreadsheet; the spreadsheet was straining.
Plugging into MyCampusPadi
The turning point came when he listed the service as a vendor on MyCampusPadi. Orders that used to arrive through WhatsApp voice notes at midnight now came in structured: items, quantities, pickup window, paid up front.
"The app gave us two things we couldn't build ourselves — trust and traffic. New customers could see we were real, see ratings, and order without knowing anybody. That's when it stopped being a hostel thing and became a business."
Six months later
Today the operation handles laundry from three hostels and a growing off-campus clientele. It pays Kelechi, his delivery rider, and three washing partners — "three families," as he puts it, "fed by an idea a panel almost scored 6/10 for being 'too simple'."
His advice for students sitting on their own projects:
- Solve a problem you can see from your window. Not a global problem. A hostel problem.
- Start before you're ready. His first order was washed in a bucket. Nobody knew. Nobody cared.
- Charge from day one. Free customers give feedback; paying customers give you a business.
- Get on a platform early. Distribution is harder than building. Borrow it where you can.
The bound copy of his project still sits on a shelf in his old department. The unbound version is out there washing your clothes.
Know a student vendor with a story worth telling? Nominate them below — Spotlights runs monthly.